The Story of Geographical Discovery eBook

Thus, practically within our own time, the interior
of Africa, where once geographers, as the poet Butler
puts it, “placed elephants instead of towns,”
has become known, in its main outlines, by successive
series of intrepid explorers, who have often had to
be warriors as well as scientific men. Whatever
the motives that have led the white man into the centre
of the Dark Continent—­love of adventure,
scientific curiosity, big game, or patriotism—­the
result has been that the continent has become known
instead of merely its coast-line. On the whole,
English exploration has been the main means by which
our knowledge of the interior of Africa has been obtained,
and England has been richly rewarded by coming into
possession of the most promising parts of the continent—­the
Nile valley and temperate South Africa. But France
has also gained a huge extent of country covering
almost the whole of North-West Africa. While much
of this is merely desert, there are caravan routes
which tap the basin of the Niger and conduct its products
to Algeria, conquered by France early in the century,
and to Tunis, more recently appropriated. The
West African provinces of France have, at any rate,
this advantage, that they are nearer to the mother-country
than any other colony of a European power; and the
result may be that African soldiers may one of these
days fight for France on European soil, just as the
Indian soldiers were imported to Cyprus by Lord Beaconsfield
in 1876. Meanwhile, the result of all this international
ambition has been that Africa in its entirety is now
known and accessible to European civilisation.

CHAPTER XII

THE POLES—­FRANKLIN—­ROSS—­NORDENSKIOLD—­NANSEN

Almost the whole of the explorations which we have
hitherto described or referred to had for their motive
some practical purpose, whether to reach the Spice
Islands or to hunt big game. Even the excursions
of Davis, Frobisher, Hudson, and Baffin in pursuit
of the north-west passage, and of Barentz and Chancellor
in search of the north-east passage, were really in
pursuit of mercantile ends. It is only with James
Cook that the era of purely scientific exploration
begins, though it is fair to qualify this statement
by observing that the Russian expedition under Behring,
already referred to, was ordered by Peter the Great
to determine a strictly geographical problem, though
doubtless it had its bearings on Russian ambitions.
Behring and Cook between them, as we have seen, settled
the problem of the relations existing between the
ends of the two continents Asia and America, but what
remained still to the north of terra firma
within the Arctic Circle? That was the problem
which the nineteenth century set itself to solve,
and has very nearly succeeded in the solution.
For the Arctic Circle we now possess maps that only
show blanks over a few thousand square miles.